On the value of information within a collaborative decision making framework for airport departure operations

As airport surface surveillance technologies develop, aircraft ground position information becomes more easily available and accurate. The value of these technologies, and more particularly the value of surface surveillance information, can be derived from the operational enhancements they provide within Air Traffic operations. This article provides a better understanding of the value of surface surveillance systems within tomorrow's collaborative framework, where departures, and more specifically push-back times, will be collaboratively optimized. It quantifies analytically the potential benefits yielded by providing surveillance information to the agent which is entrusted with tactically optimizing push-back and taxi clearances under nominal conditions. This work proposes a novel approach to the valuation of surveillance information. A stochastic model of surface operations is developed and calibrated to emulate departure surface operations at LaGuardia Airport. Two levels of information are examined within a tactically optimized Collaborative Decision Making framework. For each level, emissions and number of taxiing aircraft are analyzed in order to determine the value of surveillance information. Safety benefits, however, are not considered in this paper. It was estimated that surface surveillance information could improve optimization of departure operations, by reducing emissions and the number of taxiing aircraft by 5.7%, without impacting the runway utilization rate.